Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from theWall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. Represented by the Washington Post Writers Group, he is a recipient of the […]

To Danziger, failing president Donald Trump’s reported demand for a loyalty oath from the recalcitrant FBI director Comey, whom he later fired, could have dire implications for his Congressional rubber-stamps, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.

Seth Meyers asks why Paul Ryan — who complained so righteously about the process when Obamacare passed in 2009 — rammed through the Trumpcare bill with far less scrutiny and ceremony than the Democratic bill endured back then.

Hidden in the Trumpcare bill s a provision allowing insurers to reduce benefits in insurance policies provided by employers. The employee beneficiaries are not covered under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, at all, but were protected by the ACA’s required coverage provisions.

The Trumpcare bill, wrote the Republican governors of Ohio, Michigan, Arkansas, and Nevada in a letter to House and Senate leaders, “provides almost no new flexibility for states, does not ensure the resources necessary to make sure no one is left out, and shifts significant new costs to states.”

This week Trump tried to blame the misconduct of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn on the previous administration (which fired Flynn before Trump hired him). Because, as Danziger observes, nothing is ever, ever, ever his fault.

The second plank of Trump’s job program is the much touted and much delayed “trillion-dollar infrastructure jobs plan,” favored by White House adviser Steve Bannon. However, the plan has yet to be drawn up and is not scheduled for presentation until next year. It remains to be seen if Trump and Bannon can harmonize their infrastructure jobs program with that of Senate Democrats or the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Stephen Colbert kicks off his celebration of the American Health Care Act’s demise with a short animated portrayal of the Republicans’ legislative suicide, and continues with actual ads from right-wing organizations praising Republicans in Congress for what they had failed to do — which ran over the weekend, after the bill died.

Republicans never thought to pretend that Trumpcare would be “terrific” and fix the things voters don’t like about the Affordable Care Act — high deductibles, unchecked premiums and the insurance mandate — because they knew any replacement they offered would have higher deductibles and less help from the government to pay premiums

Democrats cannot limit themselves to defensive efforts to salvage the Affordable Care Act at either the federal or the state level. They need to think about a more attractive national agenda in health care that reflects the lessons of the ACA and new political realities. The coming national Democratic debate is going to focus on extending Medicare—to whom, how quickly, and under what rules will be the questions.

The GOP disaster in failing to pass the health care measure called into question Trump’s ability to get other key parts of his agenda, including tax cuts and a boost in infrastructure spending, through a Congress controlled by his own party.

Instead of exhibiting political discipline or party unity, the arch right-wing House Freedom Caucus has demanded a series of increasingly draconian measures in the Trumpcare legislation to secure their votes — proving that they, not Speaker Ryan and certainly not Trump, control the process.

John Oliver is brilliant as ever on the GOP health care bill — but if you can only watch a few minutes of his latest segment fast forward to the incredibly funny “Catheter Cowboy” ad the Last Week Tonight host placed on Fox and Friends, hoping to educate that show’s Oval Office fan about his own legislation.

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters. Breitbart.com is coming for Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), and it’s using the GOP health care bill that President Donald Trump supports to attack him. Last night, the sycophantic pro-Trump site previously run by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon published audio of a House GOP conference call from last October in […]

Trump managed to persuade a lot of those white Americans that he would give them better and cheaper health insurance. That’s not going to happen. Trump was too smart to ridicule the have-nots while he was on the campaign trail, but his policies are still going to give them the shaft.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol berated the Republican Party for rushing through an unpopular bill that has already faced brutal condemnation from the American Medical Association. At the end of the segment, Kristol predicted that the GOP bill is “going to fall apart and there will not be a vote.”

But the real dirty secret that the GOP will likely refuse ever to admit is that its plan to eliminate the ACA is also a stealth plan to gut one of the most popular things the government has ever done that didn’t involve killing Osama bin Laden — Medicaid — while laying the ground work to gut another — Medicare.

Nobody — at least nobody in the Republican Party — seems to understand that Americans love their public health insurance much better than they like Donald Trump.

A new analysis on Wednesday from the Kaiser Family Foundation projects that the HealthCare.gov insurance marketplace’s average premium subsidy — which people use to help purchase coverage — would shrink by at least 36 percent in 2020 under GOP proposals being considered.

We should take a lesson from Trump’s GOP, which won bigly by appealing directly to its base with full-throated partisan rhetoric. America needs an uprising from the left that is large enough to wipe away the damage conservative selfishness has done to our nation and planet. And it can’t start soon enough.

Until recently, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tolerated Trump’s turbulent debut because they agreed with the direction the White House was heading — or were confident they could nudge it in the desired one. But the newfound partnership is showing signs of serious strain.

Once described by conservatives as the intellectual leader and conscience of the Republican Party, the Samantha Bee skewers Paul Ryan for his contradicting views on Trump’s policies and wonders how a “once principled social and fiscal conservative winds up in bed with a bigoted, adulterous grope machine?”